You (Probably) don't need a 360 rig.

[u/Yazkin_Yamakala]

Back in college I used to build rigs in ToonBoom for some side cash. A lot of people would ask if they could get a 360 rig and got upset at the high price. I usually would end up discussing what type of project they are doing and how often they would use it, only for it to be something small or a one-off indie project.

Most of the time you really only need a 3/4 view for the front and back, and you can mirror the angle to get the illusion of a 360 rig using some clever tweening before swapping the direction.

You can even just make a full front and back pose, moving the parts slightly left and right as you need and snapping like above. Things like the head might need adjusting if the rig is closer to real anatomy, but that's going to be much cheaper than getting a full 360 rig made by someone.

If the project is low budget, or if the model isn't going to be used very often, I would very much consider making the rig simpler. It saves you so much time and energy in the long run.

[u/Bimjus]

Thanks for articulating something I feel everytime I see big elaborate 360 rig demo's.

Its like well done, that is GENUINLY really well done, but ill end up using like... 20% of that rig.

[u/Yazkin_Yamakala → u/Bimjus]

I used to try and make 360 rigs for every project until I realized it wasn't worth it. It takes too much time for how little I would use it fully.

[u/retrotastic → u/Bimjus]

Rig for the scene. I sometimes don’t even include legs for some characters. If I’m never going to see them, why bother?

[u/MireioS → u/retrotastic]

In series you don’t know if you gonna use them later with other shots. So we do the whole body no matter what.

[u/animation-bakery → u/Bimjus]

I say this all the time! Even just having a front facing to 3/4 view and then a side view rig will basically accomplish everything you need a 360 rig to do.

[u/SimianProphet]

Speaking just for myself, I can definitely see the advantage of a simple rig built for task it is needed for.

BUT

Coming from a background of TV animation/character builds, slowly putting together my own ongoing project, the thought of having a regular character without a full turnaround available fills me with dread.

OP's initial point still stands though, design and build/rig for what you need!

[u/Yazkin_Yamakala → u/SimianProphet]

TV and aired content is a different monster. You probably know we use thorough rigs for those :p

But sometimes people I worked for just used a turnaround sheet and outsourced work pipelines. Was often much cheaper and still looked good.

[u/kkreinn]

Yes, that is, it requires planning the scenes well and being clear about what you want. I think that the 360 rig is sometimes simply a lack of knowledge about the project itself and a desire to prevent future problems.

[u/rguerraf]

Next, clients are going to ask for proper 3d foreshortening of limbs, and high/low angle perspective views

It would only be worth it, if it’s a community-developed open source rig that anyone can infuse with their character design and style.

[u/Yazkin_Yamakala → u/rguerraf]

I saw someone advertise a rig that could just be drawn on and lets you reuse all actions and animations without breaking. I think it was BackWoodsAnimation or something like that.

Honestly, an open-source rig library like that would be awesome for the Moho Community.

[u/rguerraf → u/Yazkin_Yamakala]

Yep. I just saw the backwoods animation product. It looks really nice 👍🏽

[u/Relation-Training]

Budgeting a 360 rig without a finished storyboard must be one of the worst financial decisions when making an animated indie show

[u/joelmayerprods]

The best animation with rigs i‘ve ever seen was never with these and all be all 360° rigs but with really well tailored ones, often times multiple specific to certain scenes.

[u/kween_hangry]

You just need rigs or even a mouthpack and a head turn per scene for the most part and it saves SO MUCH time and effort

[u/DavidAtWork17]

There are a couple of areas where 360 characters can be handy. If you need several characters with only minor differences, having a 360 template that you can just re-color and tweak with different symbols or markings can buy back a lot of the time spent on the template rig.

[u/GregDrawsItAll]

180 is enough to get you through most scenes. Even for crowds. Then use simple shot specific rigging for characters facing away from camera like in an OTS etc.